Two more articles caught my eye—one in the Florence Times about Edith Faulk’s election as president of the Florence Women’s Auxiliary and one in the Tri-Cities Daily that mentioned Steadfast Coe’s disappearance. Also, I found a brief summary of Jason’s TV interview that Margaret Luster had mentioned. And then something more interesting: Steadfast’s obituary, tucked in the back pages of the March 1936 issue of the paper, the date the family must have decided to have him officially declared dead.
Founder of Coe Lumber, a member of First Presbyterian Church, and an important figure in the building of the city, Mr. Coe was widely known to possess a rare coin collection. The most valuable coin was supposedly stolen by the outlaw Dell Davidson. Davidson is currently believed to be running with a gang in Baton Rouge . . .
Somehow the story had changed, at least the official one. If Steadfast’s family really suspected Ruth, they had certainly kept the matter quiet. At least to the point that local journalists were speculating about Dell Davidson’s involvement.
Throughout the day, Griff had been updating me on the others’ second search of Jason’s house. The news wasn’t good. They’d come up empty-handed again. Now it was five o’clock. I wasn’t supposed to meet him and his parents for dinner for another hour and a half, so I decided to take a walk. I needed to breathe, to take some time alone and prepare myself for the coming storm.
I headed downstairs and out of the library, doubling back down a side road. A block or two along, I found myself before a Gothic-style redbrick church. First Presbyterian, which was over two hundred years old according to the placard on the lawn. I crept around the side, spotting a cemetery.
I saw the granite obelisk, towering above every other marker, before I even reached the gate. STEADFAST ORILLION COE SEPTEMBER 6, 1847–APRIL 11, 1934. Next to it, LUCETTE RAMEY COE and another set of dates. Steadfast’s wife.
I sighed heavily, studying her stone. “He’ll be home soon, Lucette. Just a matter of time.”
I dialed Danny’s number, getting his voice mail. “Danny, there’s something we need to talk about. Something important. Call me when you can.” I paused, hoping something comforting would come out of my mouth, but it didn’t. All I felt was hopelessness.
“I love you,” I said and hung up.
A horn made me jump. The window of a gleaming black Lexus rolled down, and Jason Faulk’s handsome face peered out from the cool confines of the sedan. He was dressed in another suit, this time spotless ivory linen. “Need a ride?”
I climbed in and Jason pointed the car toward the river.
“I see you found Steadfast’s grave,” Jason said.
I sent him a glum look. “Won’t be empty for long, the way things are going.”
“You got a minute to spare? Or am I interrupting your plans to wander morosely around town?”
I ignored his sarcasm. “I’ve got dinner at six-thirty.” I gazed out the window at the quiet street. “But yeah, basically just killing time until then.”
He stopped at a light. “Today, while we were searching my house, Ember had one of her psychic moments, and we practically destroyed the original, old-growth chestnut flooring in one of my upstairs bedrooms,” he said genially. “All we found were a couple of very startled spiders.”
I sighed. “I appreciate you letting us into your home. I appreciate your help.”
“I’m sorry it turned out this way, Eve. I really am.”
“Can I ask where we’re going?” I said.
“I have to go down to Birmingham for a couple of meetings, but I was hoping to find you so we could talk, just the two of us, before I left. I’m taking you to the best spot in north Alabama. Where I go when I need to get my head right. You okay with that?”
“Sure, why not?”
We sped over the bridge and headed up the opposite bluff. The winding road was shaded by old elms and oaks, the houses set far back from the road and mostly obscured from view.
“Forgive me if I’m talking out of turn,” Jason said. “But I got to thinking about your predicament and it occurred to me that you might actually benefit from my experience.” He turned between two broken-down split-rail fence ends and wheeled down a long single-lane drive. “As you may imagine, it’s no cakewalk for a gay man to announce that he’s going to run for governor in this state. But after the flurry of attention died down—including the charming social media posts suggesting I be run out of the state and/or imprisoned—I realized nobody could stop me from doing what I wanted to do. What I was born to do. So I picked myself up and got back to work. People may not like it, but I’m still here. And still going.”
“I admire you for that.”
“It wasn’t easy. But I really love this place and the people, most of them.”
“Yeah.” I sighed. “People can be a tough crowd.”
He parked at the end of the drive, where the beginnings of a narrow path snaked into the woods.
“You’re not luring me out here to beat the crap out of me and shove my face in a pile of bones, are you?”
He looked at me with a disturbed look. “Jesus.”
“Last time I went for a walk with a guy, I got the crap beat out of me.”
Jason shook his head. “I swear, Eve. Alabama is not that bad of a place.”
He beckoned me forward and we walked through a small orchard of old pecan trees, then came upon a small grassy area with a spectacular view—a sweeping vista of the thundering river below, the quaint town, and rising hills beyond. I walked to the edge and peered over. The view was dizzying.
“Gorgeous, right?” The voice sounded familiar.
I turned to see my brother standing beside Jason. He lifted a hand. He was dressed in dark jeans and a blue dress shirt, and the hand he lifted was like a white flag of surrender. When I got closer, his mouth dropped open. “Eve! Your eye!”
“Looks worse than it is, I promise. Now somebody better start talking, fast.”
“Let’s sit.” Jason pointed to a bench made out of artfully bent twigs situated at the very edge of the bluff. Danny and I sat, but Jason remained standing. I jiggled my knee nervously, adrenaline shooting through me.
Jason folded his arms. “So, Eve. Long story short, Danny contacted me a couple of days ago, looking for you.”
I gaped at both of them.
Jason nodded at Danny. “He had called Margaret Luster, and she told him you’d come to Florence to see me.”
“And then you told him what was going on,” I said flatly.
Danny waved his hand in dismissal. “I knew something was wrong when you didn’t fly back home with us. It just took me a while to get the details straight.” He clenched his jaw. “You didn’t have to hide the truth from me, Eve. I could’ve taken it.”
“Could you? I don’t know.”
He looked offended. “Nobody ever knows that kind of thing for sure. That’s what trust is.”
I averted my eyes from his gaze, wounded. I hated to admit it, but he wasn’t wrong. I always thought I was so different from Dove, that I was doing so much better for my family. But he was right. I’d been shutting Mom and Danny off in my own way.
“Would you mind if we talked business, Eve?” Jason asked.
“Do I have a choice?” I said.
He ignored my sarcasm. “How bad do you think it’s going to be? I mean, really? You know, the world’s come a long way since Jimmy Swaggart in the hotel with prostitutes. So who do you expect will pick up the story? What publications?”
I leaned back, the twigs digging into my back. “Honestly, I’m not sure. These scandals might be passé, but people still like to see their idols fall.”
Danny nodded his assent. “More likely, though, it’ll just be Charisma and Christianity Today. Maybe World. The big guns in conservative religious circles. But sometimes other outlets do pick up the story and it ends up going mainstream, and when that happens, you’re finished.”
Jason absorbed this. “You’ll put out a statement, though, co
rrect?”
“We will,” I said. “Though I doubt it’ll make much difference. Faith-based corporate sponsors are notoriously skittish. We’ll lose at least half of them right away, if not more.”
Jason pursed his lips. “That’s what Danny and I wanted to talk to you about.”
I let out an exasperated sigh.
Danny touched my shoulder. “Just listen to what he has to say.”
“I want to make you an offer,” Jason said. “You and Danny.” He squinted out over the river. To our left, the sun was sinking, warming the surface of the water, saving its best rays for the last hour of the day. “I’d like to go to the authorities myself. Tell them what’s happened to you, what this guy, this asshole, is doing to you. And tell them what I know.”
I blinked at him. “What you know? I don’t follow.”
He nodded. “That my great-great-grandfather, Steadfast Coe, actually wandered off willingly—because he intended to end his own life.”
I shot Jason a look, then Danny, but both their faces were unreadable. “Wait, you’re telling me you knew this all along and you—” Jason’s look made me pause. The insouciant curl of his lip, and the smug lift of his eyebrows. “Oh.” I laughed at my gullibility. “Okay, I get it. You’re saying you would lie.”
He tilted his head to one side. “I am a politician, after all.”
“Not funny. So not funny, Jason.”
“Eve, it would be so simple,” Danny said. “It’s the perfect solution.”
“I have reams of his papers,” Jason said. “Letters, notes, his will, typed on a 1926 green Corona, which, it so happens, is still in my possession.”
I shook my head. “Wow. Okay.”
“I mean,” Jason went on, “who’s to say Steadfast didn’t type a suicide note on, let’s say, the back of his will?”
Danny leaned forward. “It would be nothing, Eve. He could just say his family was embarrassed about the suicide and wanted to keep the story quiet. He could put a stop to this guy accusing Dove and we could all move on.”
“It’s not nothing, Danny. Lying is never nothing.” I glanced over the bluff. It would be easy; he was absolutely right. And probably nobody around Florence would care enough to debunk a letter like that, not even the police. Most importantly, it would immediately quash the asshole’s attack on the foundation.
Mom and Danny and the foundation would all be safe. And I’d be free to go on with my life. I’d finally feel free enough to let them go.
But it would make me more of a liar than I already was. And Danny and Jason would be complicit in the lie. Worst of all, it would turn me into everything I despised. I would be just like Dove.
But wasn’t I like her already? I’d been lying by omission to Mom and Danny since I was fourteen. Not telling them that Dove was a fraud. I was already following in my grandmother’s footsteps, so what was one more lie? Who even cared? Maybe we were all doomed to run away from the truth until the day we died and let those left behind pick up the pieces.
Jason stood. “Don’t give me your answer now, but you should know the letter is ready to go.” He looked at his watch. “You’ve got a few hours left. I’ll drop you at your dinner on my way out of town. I’ll be waiting for your call.”
He strolled back to the car and Danny took my hand.
“Don’t be mad.”
“I’m not,” I said. “But now that we’re being honest . . . I should probably tell you the rest.”
“The rest about Dove, right?” Danny said. “What happened that time you flew to see her when you were a kid?”
I nodded.
“I’m ready.” Danny stood, pulling me up with him. “Tell me everything in the car.”
Chapter Thirty-Six
Florence, Alabama
1934
It was up to Ruth, and Ruth alone, to pry Bruna loose from the clutches of Arthur Holt. She’d arrived at this dismal, thoroughly inescapable realization the night of the Doves of Hattiesburg meeting.
The Doves were a ladies’ church group that organized charity drives and soup kitchens for farmers in the area who found themselves down on their luck. This particular meeting was a benefit for the children—a fund to keep the school open for a few more hours a day—and they’d invited the Hawthorn Sisters. The girls were scheduled for singing and healing and then the president of the club, a Miss Evergreen Smith Staples, was to preach. For some reason, the whole arrangement seemed to put Arthur in a sour mood.
They rode to the meeting grounds in his newly purchased Hudson truck, but he grumbled the whole way. “I told them I’d do the preaching for a discounted fee. But they said no. The love offering’ll be next to nothing with a bunch of ladies there.”
“You don’t know that,” Ruth said.
“I do. Husbands may send their wives out the door with pocketbooks full of cash for Billy Sunday or John Lake, but not for anyone named Miss Evergreen Smith Staples.” He punctuated this declaration with a sneer.
Later, Ruth would understand there was a deeper root to his foul temper.
Tupelo was a pretty town, and rather than being on the outskirts, the meeting tent was right in the middle of Main Street. The tent was bright white canvas with pots of palms and gardenias set out at every corner and swarmed with ladies and children. All of the Doves were dressed in white with corsages of lilies or azaleas at their collars.
Ruth ran her scales outside the tent at half past four, just before the meeting was to get underway. She kept a sharp eye on the lines of ladies in lacy white dresses filing into the tent. They looked like they may prove Arthur wrong and drop plenty of cabbage in the pot. Arthur and Bruna were off somewhere, getting up to their usual who-knew-what. Her friend had seemed quieter lately, pale and distracted. Ruth knew she was grieving the loss of her grandfather, but she wondered if it was something more. Some private matter Bruna didn’t think it proper to discuss with Ruth.
She wanted to be miffed, but what could she expect? She’d kept plenty from Bruna—and her secret was a gracious plenty more serious. If Bruna wanted to keep something to herself, who was Ruth to complain?
She was getting ants in her pants. She always did before they went on. It wasn’t the singing, it was the rest of it that didn’t sit well with her. The way the people rushed to her and Bruna, their faces drawn in sorrow or pain, and fell at their feet. The desperate way they grabbed the hem of her dress or her sleeve. Part of it she understood. She’d been cold and hungry and lonely at one time in her life, but she’d always had her pride and more than a little fight in her. She’d never groveled. But what did she have to offer them?
She was just a bastard born in a lunatic asylum. A runaway, a thief and grifter. And now—if you wanted to get right down to it—a fornicator as well.
And yet . . .
When she laid her hands on people, things happened. They trembled and sweated. Raised their hands and wailed and cried. They fell down, in waves sometimes, like a giant, invisible hand was sweeping chess pieces off a board. And then they declared themselves healed—of their headaches and backaches and neuralgia and internal bleeding, breast cancer, rheumatism, even blindness.
But had these illnesses really been healed? Or were the people mistaken? At times, Ruth had felt something strange—a sort of electric charge hit her, then coursed through her body. But was the charge related to the healings, or did the healings cause the charge? She didn’t know.
The long and short of it was, the whole thing had begun to frighten Ruth and she wanted loose of it.
The piano started up, whoever was working the pedals going at it like an especially determined soldier on a march toward battle. She could hear the corresponding thrum of the women inside the tent, clapping and stomping their feet. This one was going to be a humdinger.
She scanned the sidewalks, hoping to spot Bruna and Arthur. Down a ways, she saw one of the Doves, who’d cornered a man. The fellow was standing partly behind a parked car so she couldn’t see his face, but he was tal
l and dressed entirely in black. She could only see the top of his oiled black hair.
The poor rube must be getting chewed out for trying to sneak into the female-only affair. That struck her as unusual. Most fellows used the occasion of ladies singing to slip down to a local juice joint and tie one on. But there were the odd ducks here and there. The types that felt the need to supervise in case the womenfolk imbibed too much of the Spirit and got up to no good.
“Miss Davidson?” It was one of the Doves, a helper running the meeting. “Five minutes.”
Ruth smiled. “Thank you.”
She trotted around the other side of the tent, hoping to get a glimpse of Arthur and Bruna. She spotted them a half a block up the street, standing on the steps of a bank. Their heads were bent close and their hands clasped. She didn’t much fancy busting up a romantic clinch, but work was work. It was best if they got their fannies up on that stage before all that hand-clapping, foot-stomping fervor lagged. More excitement meant more healings, and that meant more money.
She started toward the bank. But as she drew closer, she realized Bruna and Arthur weren’t kissing at all but praying. Well, Bruna was praying, her soft voice carrying down the sidewalk.
“. . . and forgive me my trespasses as I forgive those who trespass against me.”
“What are your trespasses?” Ruth heard Arthur say.
Ruth stopped and there was a beat of silence.
“Standing on a stage before men and God,” Bruna said.
“And?”
“Preaching and instructing from the scriptures.”
“And?”
She hesitated and when she spoke again her voice was small and careworn. “Vanity of appearance. Love of self. Jezebel spirit.”
There was a pause. “All right, then. Finish up.”
“Almighty God,” Bruna said in a small voice. “I humbly repent of these sins and any others I commit tonight. I ask for your gracious forgiveness in the name of your son, Jesus Christ, and commit myself fully to you, body and soul.”
Reviving the Hawthorn Sisters Page 20
